"Wha? Oh, Mel Kiper here dudes. The Illini will win seven. No, eight. No, seven. Hey, man, no fair. Stop bogarting the Doritos."The Goat checked in with an assessment of the 2007 Illini:
I think the people who are picking Illinois to win 7 games are completely
stoned. Not that our non-conference schedule is anything tough but for the
first time I can remember, we play Michigan, Ohio St., Penn St, Wisconsin
and Iowa in the same season. The two conference teams not on our schedule
this season are Michigan St. and Purdue.
We've had two fantastic recruiting classes but that also means we're young
in a couple of areas so I think it's much more fair to expect 7 wins out of
the team next season. We do return 9 starters from a defense that was much
improved last season and watch out for incoming Freshmen (Martez Wilson -
linebacker and D'Angelo McCray - defensive line).
Our offense should be better. Keys are obviously Juice Williams and Rashard
Mendenhall. Mendenhall averaged 8 yards a carry last season in limited duty
and has put on 20 lbs of muscle. He has the potential to be a stud but has
to hold on to the ball. Finally have some speed at receiver position but
we're heavily relying on a true freshman (Arrelious Benn) to be the savior
and beyond him, we're not that deep. I don't know that much about the
offensive line but have read that Akim Millington is healthy this year. He
was very hyped coming into last season as a transfer from Oklahoma but
wasn't healthy. If he plays up to all they hype from last year, could be a
force on the offensive line.
Bottom line is that I still think this team is too young offensively for
anyone to be making realistic predictions. And who knows if we're going to
improve in the turnover and special teams departments (which absolutely
killed us last season). 5 wins would have to be considered a very
successful season. But I think only 3 wins would be a huge failure.
Although we only won two games last season there was drastic improvement
considering that we didn't get blown out by teams like Wisconsin, Ohio St.
and Penn St. but we also couldn't get it done against Syracuse, Indiana,
Northwestern and Ohio University. We simply must win those type of games
this season.
The only time I've ever predicted anything for an Illini football team was
during Kurt Kittner's sophomore season right after we blew out Ohio St. I
predicted (of course out of complete cynicism) that when he was a senior
we'd probably win the conference, considering the national championship game
would be the Rose Bowl that year, and that would just be our luck to finally
win the conference only to be denied the Rose Bowl (and unfortunately that's
exactly what happened).
So let's just be patient and hope that by the time Juice Williams is a
Junior or Senior that all of the pieces of this puzzle will have fallen into
place.
Update: I just checked the BCS national championship schedule and see that
the January, 2010 Rose Bowl is set to be the National Championship game. So
I am now officially predicting that the Illini will win the Big Ten in 2009
(which will be Juice Williams' senior season) and again be denied a trip to
the Rose Bowl.
Sounds about right to me. If I get some time later in the week I'll make my game predictions.
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